I just recently read the description of the "Set Skin" feature (in the Manage Skins dialog box). When I read it, I thought it would provide me a relatively easy way to add different mouth "poses" to my already existing models. But, as far as I can tell, using the "Set Skin" feature effectively limits you to two skins, meaning you can add as many skins as you want (and assign faces to those skins) but ... in the end, you've really only got two skins. I'll explain what I'm doing (by quoting from another post I left about this feature) to explain:

Quote:

---

I have been trying to change the skin only on my model's mouth, so that the mouth can be open when she's supposed to be talking. I can do this if I make the first skin (the first skin listed in Skin Manager) be a skin with the mouth open and I use "Set skin" to assign it to the faces that make up the mouth area. The rest of the skin is just a solid color. The second skin is just a normal skin (the whole body and clothes) with the mouth closed (and I use "Set Skin" to assign it to all the other faces on the model.)

When the skin on this model equals 1, I see the open mouth and the rest of the body/clothes are normal. So the body/clothes are coming from the second skin. When skin = 2 on this model, I see the seocnd skin in its entirety (mouth closed.)

---

So what else can you do with this feature, besides replace one part of the model's appearance with a different skin? And this only works on that first skin. I've tried everything to try and get more than one mouth position, but nothing works. You can only assign a particular face or group of faces one time -- if you assign again, they get reassigned, and that previous face assignment can't be viewed. So you can have one part of the model that displays differently on that first skin and that's it. I am hoping that I'm just missing something and someone will point out a way to get more functionality out of this feature.

I found set skin is only useful when applying a particular skin to the base of the model as a whole so I could choose any one of my skins to be the overall skin rather than the default top one, havnt experimented any further with it though.

What you need is to have a number fo skins for the animation and choose them via script to show the animated skin.

If you added the head as a seperate model onto the body then that would make the skins smaller and easier to handle as only the head skin will be changing and not the entire models skin.

If you use Set Skin on one of your skins to make it the overall skin, do you find you can still change the skin via script and see the change? For me, I always use a number of different skins on my model, and I choose the skin I want to display with the entity.skin property via script, but I don't use Set Skin, because I have found it unnecessary.

But if I use Set Skin on a subset of faces, then I have to use Set Skin again on the remaining faces with a different skin and after that, those are the only two skins you can use. It's not clear to me what Set Skin does when you do it with all faces selected; it might fix it so that none of the other skins work, since none of them have any faces assigned.

No sorry, never went that far with it, I use it only to experiment with a number of skins in MED directly to rapidly determine which one I am going to actually use in game.